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Children Held in Prison

Since the current government took office in August 2005, it has carried out a harsh campaign against the civilian population in areas of FNL activity, arresting, torturing, and even summarily executing those thought to provide material assistance to the FNL. Using FNL combatants in government custody to identify targets for arrest, police and security agents have detained hundreds of persons, including children, who have allegedly provided food, water or lodging to FNL members.²⁸ As of May 15, 2006, the Mpimba prison in Bujumbura had thirty-one minors charged with the crime of participation in an armed group, all of them detained since August 2005. At least nine others were held on the same charge in prisons elsewhere in the country.²⁹ Some admit to having been a member of the FNL at one point, while others state that they had only given water or food to rebels when forced to do so. None has been tried or sentenced.³⁰

One fifteen-year-old boy from Bujumbura-rural province currently held in Mpimba told a Human Rights Watch researcher that he had been forcibly recruited by the FNL on his way home from school when he was ten years old. He managed to escape the rebel group one year later and returned home, where he worked helping his parents cultivate their land. In October 2005, captured FNL combatants who had known him years before, identified him as an FNL member. He was arrested, and had been in the central prison for nine months when our researchers spoke to him.³¹

Another sixteen-year-old boy, also from Bujumbura-rural province, admitted to Human Rights Watch that he had carried wood for the FNL, but said that he had never been a combatant. Arrested after having been identified by captured FNL fighters, he spent four months in Mpimba prison before appearing before a magistrate. According to this child, “The magistrate told me that I had to wait for the president of the country to decide my case and liberate me and people like me. The magistrate told me I would never have a trial because there is no evidence against me.”³²

Under Burundian criminal procedure, a person may be detained for a maximum of one week, with a possible extension to two weeks in cases of “necessary delay” (sauf prorogation indispensable) by the judicial police, but after that the person must be charged or released.³³

Children held at Mpimba are housed in separate quarters from adults, but in severely over-crowded conditions. Several children complained of not having sufficient room to lie down at night.³⁴ Children at Ngozi prison who lack money to pay for the use of a mattress sleep on the cement floor.³⁵ Children in prison receive inadequate food, each being given a cup of manioc flour and a cup of beans per day. They must cook the manioc themselves. To have the charcoal necessary for cooking, some children must sell part of their food ration for charcoal. The children have no access to education and little opportunity for fresh air and exercise. They receive little in the way of medical or other services.³⁶ On a visit to Mpimba prison on May 16, 2006, a Human Rights Watch researcher found a sixteen-year-old former FNL combatant who had been shot in the hip during a skirmish with government forces the year before. He was never treated for his injury and showed signs of infection extending from his hip to his knee and lower leg.³⁷